How to win a won game. Or don't panic when you are winning.

The situation: you are facing a stronger opponent, and he makes a move that is clearly a blunder. What to do?

'If I can see clearly that this is a blunder, how can't he see that? Isn't there any trap?'

Finally, after a lot of hesitation you capture that damn hanging knight, and your opponent doesn't resign, but keeps doing some active moves in an other part of the board.

You realize that his move was actually a blunder, but he won't resign. He is going to press you until you make any silly mistake and loose the game. The every one will laugh at you for loosing a theoretically won game. Panic.

Is he being rude by not resigning after a blunder? No, he is just doing his best to recover at least half a point. A few days ago I published a game of the 2020 chess.com  daily chess championship where I was the one who blundered a knight  and recovered the full point with an 'all in' attack.

Now I'm in the other side, in a game against the top seeded player of my group who blundered a knight and tried to open lines to attack my king. Luckily I was aware and stopped him, winning  the game.

• Go for possitions with lots of tactic opportunities (if you fail to spot a tactic, you lose anyway, if your opponent fails, the result of the match may change)
• Put all of you pieces pointing to squares close to enemy king
• Open lines, mainly by pawn exchanges
• Don't exchange your pieces except for opening lines or preparing tactics
• Be more prepared for sacrifices than ever, even if you can't calculate all the combinations after the sacrifice, if the position gets complex enough there is a chance your opponent will fail to spot a combination that makes you come back to the game
• Keep you king safe enough so your can't use checks for getting out of combinations.

• Look for the attacking plans of your opponent and block them, for example with pawns defending the entry squares of enemy pieces or breaking squares of enemy pawns (17.g4 in the game was an example of this)
• Put your pieces close to your king to defend, but in squares from where they can attack (16.Qd2 in the game). Always look for counterattacks.
• Exchange the attacking pieces of your oponent, with no pieces there is no attack (13. Nxe7+ is a direct example, 15.h3 and 19.Bd5 were exange proposals that provoke black to give something else in order to avoid the exchange.
• If you can, hide behind your enemy's pawns; he may sacrifice against your pawns, but he can't sacrifice against his own pawns. (In this game there is no evident example of this, the closer example is the position after 19...c6, where there black pawn on c6 protects the white king from the bishop on b7)

As I told, these ideas are not new, and there are plenty of high level games illustrating them. I hope this example from a lower level game will help to find how to use this ideas in your own games. Remember you don't need to do the move that Stockfish would do, just the easier one that will lead to your objective. The meaning of 'easier' is very relative to your playing skills.